Release notes for Acronis vmProtect 8 Update 1

Overview

Acronis® vmProtect™ 8 is the next version of our extremely easy to deploy and use solution built specifically for backup and recovery of VMware vSphere. Version 8 includes many new features such as:

Incremental Restore (aka vmFlashback) – When restoring a backup over an original virtual machine we will only copy blocks that were actually changed. The result is that restoring is now 10 to 100 times faster than before.

Staging/Multi-destination – This long-awaited and highly requested feature is now also available in vmProtect. It automatically copies all or some of your backups to an additional location; locally or to the cloud. This provides additional reliability and simplifies transferring large backups over slow Internet links.

Full integration into the vCenter – Now, as an alternative to the vmProtect intuitive web-based console, all backup, recovery and replication operations can be managed directly from the vCenter. The integration is available under Inventory->Solutions and Applications->Acronis vmProtect 8.0 for vSphere clients connected to vCenter.

In addition, we fixed many issues and implemented several improvements suggested by our customers.

Before you install the product, please carefully read the "Installation notes" and "Known issues" sections of this document.

Installation notes

Before installation of Acronis vmProtect 8 Update 1, please uninstall Acronis vmProtect 8 Beta. Although updating from the Beta version is technically supported, it is not recommended. You can safely upgrade from Acronis vmProtect 6 or Acronis vmProtect 7 or Acronis vmProtect 8 RTM to Acronis vmProtect 8 Update 1.

During the upgrade from the 6/7th version to the 8th version of Acronis vmProtect, the Restore/Validate/Exchange Restore tasks will be removed due to architectural changes. The backup tasks will be properly upgraded.

List of changes/fixes (in comparison with Acronis vmProtect 8)

Changes:

Enabled hot-add functionality for vSphere 5.0+ environments in cases where vSphere Essentials or lesser VMware license is used. Now, LAN-free backup/replication is available for all types of vSphere licenses (5.0+) when using Virtual Appliance-based installation of Acronis vmProtect.

Virtual Appliance now runs third-party custom VMware tools which support guest OS operations, i.e. you can shutdown/reset/reboot/power off the Virtual Appliance through VMware tools scripts which didn’t work before. There is no longer a warning about non-updated VMware tools in vSphere client.

The warning about missing/outdated VMware tools has been moved to information trace, so now there will be no warning in the log file upon backup or replication of a VM without VMware tools.

The 60 re-try limit has been removed and you can now adjust the number of retries up to 100,000 (Backup Options->Error Handling).

Added information about how many licenses are required for backup/replication of selected set of VMs to the backup and the replication wizards if there are insufficient licenses.

Added support for installation of Acronis vmProtect Windows Agent onto UEFI-based systems. In fact, this support is already present in the RTM build of Acronis vmProtect 8 and has been thoroughly tested by our QA team. Therefore, we can now support of this type of installation.

Added the ability to backup replica VMs. The “Show replicas” option is added to the 1st step of the backup wizard.

Significantly improved archive browsing algorithm (added caching mechanism). Now, loading the list of available recovery points in View->Recovery Points or in restore/failback wizards is up to 20 times faster than before.

Fixed the incorrect sorting of recovery points which occurred when recovery points were created by the 7th or 8th versions of Acronis vmProtect within the same archive. (Previously, the old recovery points were on top instead of the new ones.)

Backup/restore/validation

Fixed the backup to Acronis Online Backup storage failure which would occurred when there was more than 1 tasks backing up into the same account. This failure caused a conflict and the archives could not be created properly. In this scenario, the backup task started first could hang.

Fixed the inability to back up into different Acronis Online Backup subscriptions under the same account when using 2 or more Acronis vmProtect Virtual Appliances with different activated subscriptions. Previously, backups from all Virtual Appliances were backing up into 1 subscription despite the fact that there were 2 or more subscriptions activated under one Acronis Online Backup account.

Fixed the inability to back up all VMs from a selected ESX(i) host. This would occur, if the entire host was selected for backup in the backup wizard and the host contained VM templates. In this scenario, the backup could fail with “Instances list is empty” or “Failed to find registered virtual machines” errors.

Fixed wrong time-stamps (1 hour difference) in e-mail notifications sent after backup/replication for specific time zones.

Fixed the backup failure which occurred when the backed up VM had an empty ‘instanceUuid’ property in vSphere (rare case).

Fixed the recovery warning about a non-restored network adapter which occurred when the virtual network name where the backed up VM was connected to contained non-ASCII symbols. Now, such networks are properly restored.

Fixed the incorrect virtual hardware version on the restored VM. Previously when you restored a VM which had virtual hardware version 7 onto a ESXi 5.1 host, the restored VM had virtual hardware version 8.

Fixed the inability to back up an ESXi configuration which occurred in cases that had a datastore with non-ASCII symbols in its name.

Replication

Fixed the inability to create a new (or edit existing) replication task which occurred in cases when there was insufficient free space on datastore detected. Now, the replication wizard is not blocked despite the warning message and you can still create and run this task (even though it may fail due to insufficient free space).

Exchange support

Fixed very long e-mail browsing or mailbox recovery in cases when there were many Exchange transaction logs at the moment of the backup. Now, these logs are not rolled up and, therefore, do not affect the browsing/recovery speed.

Known issues

Common:

Bootable media ‘smbfs’ protocol (used for P2V and ESXi configuration recovery) is no longer supported for network share access. If you store archives on NAS devices (or other Linux-based shares), make sure that they support ‘cifs’ protocol for data access. This is the current by-design behavior.

Web console

The web console in Internet Explorer 8.0 may not open properly (only a grey background opens) if security for this zone (Internet/Intranet) is set to High level. You should either set the security level to Medium or use another browser (IE 9.0, Mozilla Firefox, etc.).

Backup/restore

Virtual Machines which have a Linux guest OS based on LVM volumes are backed up in sector-by-sector mode. This means that recovery of this VM will allocate the entire virtual disk (even if it is a thin-provisioning type). File/folder recovery from such archives is not possible. This is the by-design behavior.

When restoring an archive created by Acronis Backup and Recovery 10/11/11.5, there will be unexpected warning messages in the recovery log file. However, the restored VM will still be bootable and valid. The only issue is incorrect messages in the log file.

Exchange-aware backup is not possible in the Windows 2003 SBS edition unless there are additional adjustments. By default, the Setup program for Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 turns off the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 writer for the Volume Shadow Copy service. To protect data using Acronis vmProtect 7, the Exchange 2003 writer must be turned on: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb795725.aspx. For Exchange 2007/2010 versions, the VSS writer is turned on by default, so these versions are not affected by this issue. This is a by-design behavior.

File recovery

The sorting by filename in the 2nd step of the File recovery wizard (Explore Recovery Point) is case-sensitive. This is a by-design behavior.

Exchange support

The following types and properties of Exchange items are not supported and, therefore, are not shown when browsing through Exchange database during recovery: “RSS feeds” and “Sync issues”.

Exchange VMs hosted on ESX(i) 4.0 are not available for selection and for Exchange-aware backups due to specific limitations of VSS support. Only 4.1 and 5.0 versions are supported for Exchange-aware backups. This is a “by design” behavior.

The generated self-extractible archive cannot be opened once it becomes larger than 2Gb; therefore, it is split into 2GB chunks automatically. This is a “by design” behavior.

Replication

After the replica VM is deleted from vmProtect Web Console, there will be a folder on the datastore left which contains the test_meta.info file (it contains meta information about the replica VM). It is safe to delete this folder manually from the datastore.